ArcadeFly Blog

As things start to be used it’s always easier to flesh out what should be improved. For this week that has been the games list. After taking a tour of Orlando I ran into a surprising number of games that weren’t in the GameFaqs listing that we’re using here. The solution is to move off gamefaqs as the definitive listing for games. You’ll notice that the URLs no longer use the gamefaqs ids as the URL parameters. It’s just not a good idea to base your system that much on another one of which you have no control. Plus, as I was going arcade to arcade I was noticing other items that we might want to track (pool tables, air hockey, basketball, etc) that just wouldn’t fit into the mold if we required all games to exist on gamefaqs.

As for the games that aren’t on GameFaqs, we’ll soon be adding all games from the Killer List of Video Games as well. It’s just about ready, but I’m running into a problem with game names that are similar but not exactly the same. After I write up a script to merge the differences between these two we should have another 1,000 or so games available.

So, there’s no flood of users, or flood of push for that — just a flood of development to make things better and more kickass. Since last week we added a great way for users to add games to arcades, put a light barrier to entry in place for editing arcades through the process of claiming an arcade, added exception notifications (just emails us when something goes wrong), automated deployments, made all html valid and worked towards a faster yslow rating and of course. The last development push will be to create a good iphone version of the add games page. This will be used while walking around arcades to add games, so it’s important for it to be as easy as possible. Lastly I’ll work on making the homepage more focused, which should help users to get started.

Having the site up and functional is a great boost to working on it though. If anyone is finding it difficult to find time to work on a project, I’d suggest spend some time to deploy a working copy and get it out there. There’s more incentive now than ever before to make fixes and improvements.

Releasing the first version of a product should never be feature complete. That is to say you probably shouldn’t do every feature you want to do right from the start. Things that seem important in the planning stages might become altogether worthless to the users, while they spot huge holes that you’ve left unfilled elsewhere. In the end it’s all about getting done the core of your project — what people are coming there to see. If the forgot password form process ends up being a little odd, or some graphic seems a bit off; but users are still able to do what you wanted them to then you have yourself a great success. The rest of the details can easily be hammered out, and even better organized with user feedback.

For ArcadeFly it’s obvious what the core features of the project are. Finding arcades to play games at. There are a few features that aren’t going to make it into launch, but nothing I’d call a showstopper. There won’t be a friends system, a comment system or a messaging system right out of the gate. For starters it’ll be all about finding the arcades. Then as people join up, I’ll see where resources are needed and probably work on adding more ways of users to communicate. This really makes sense anyways, after all how can you message people or add friends until there’s a user base out there. The lack of commenting I do miss, but it at least it means deferring those questions like “How do I weed out spam?” and “Who deletes spam?”. Doing more work now could very well lead me to investing even more time down a path I don’t want to go. Best to keep it simple while you can.